Book Review: The Thousandth Floor by Katharine McGee

Goodreads Description:A hundred years in the future, New York is a city of innovation and dreams. Everyone there wants something…and everyone has something to lose.LEDA COLE’s flawless exterior belies a secret addiction—to a drug she never should have tried and a boy she never should have touched.

ERIS DODD-RADSON’s beautiful, carefree life falls to pieces when a heartbreaking betrayal tears her family apart.

RYLIN MYERS’s job on one of the highest floors sweeps her into a world—and a romance—she never imagined…but will this new life cost Rylin her old one?

WATT BAKRADI is a tech genius with a secret: he knows everything about everyone. But when he’s hired to spy for an upper-floor girl, he finds himself caught up in a complicated web of lies.

And living above everyone else on the thousandth floor is AVERY FULLER, the girl genetically designed to be perfect. The girl who seems to have it all—yet is tormented by the one thing she can never have.

One of the reading challenges I’m participating in this year is the Monthly Motif Reading Challenge. Each month, particpators have to pick a book that fits the theme for that month. The theme for the month of January was Diversify Your Reading, so I had to choose a book written by an author or with characters of a different race, religion, or sexual orientation than me (basically a character who isn’t Asian, agnostic, or heterosexual). The Thousandth Floor had numerous characters that fit criteria (ex. Leda was African American, Eris was bisexual, and Mariel was Christian).

This book reminded me of We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. Both books are about rich kids who seriously need more parental guidance. I actually ended up giving The Thousandth Floor two stars for reasons similar to why I gave two stars to We Were Liars.

The other reason why I chose to read this book, besides it have a diverse cast of characters, was because it had science fiction elements. The story is set during the year 2118 and the city of New York has been condensed into a high-tech tower with a thousand floors. I still can’t wrap my head around the sheer size of that thing (and am pretty doubtful that we could make that much progress in 101 years. But hey, it’s not called science fiction for nothing). There was a lot of mention of new technology, two of my favorite inventions being the automatic hairstyler (I need this) and gummy bears that scream and wiggle when you bite off a part of their body (I need this too, for science).

The book had a promising start, but it ended up falling flat. At the beginning of the book, there’s a tragic accident and then the story rewinds to two months before the moment. The only reason I continued reading when I got bored of the characters’ highly unnecessary drama was so I could find out more about the incident.

I didn’t care for most of the relationships, with Eris’s relationship being the exception, especially the freaky love square. It honestly made me a bit uncomfortable.

The characters were hard to relate to — they spent a lot of time drinking and doing drugs. Maybe I don’t know what normal highschoolers do anymore, but the amount of partying they did didn’t seem normal.

I was a bit distraught after skim reading the second half the book, because the ending was so unsatisfying. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just leave it at that.

I was hoping the book would include politics about the tower, like the inequality between the people living on different floors. But, I honestly should have known better from reading the synopsis. I also wish that there was more background information on why exactly the tower was built. (I mean, the tower is a thousand floors high and spans across a good portion of what used to be New York City. How cost effective is that supposed to be?).

The diverse cast of characters and neat technology wasn’t enough to make me like this book. The book relied heavily on dramatic irony, and that’s personally not my cup of tea.